ROLLING THUNDER REMEMBERED 24 MAY 1966

RIPPLE SALVO…#86… Secretary McNamara’s Report Card… but first….

Good Morning: Day EIGHTY-SIX of a review of the Vietnam “air war” at the 50th anniversary of the campaign…

24 MAY 1966… ON THE HOME FRONT… (NYT)… A sunny 85-degree Tuesday in the Big Apple…

Page 1: “Rockefeller Urges A Place On 1968 Ticket For Javits”... Governor of New York called himself a non-starter for a national office forever, and hinted that George Romney should have a spot on the Republican ticket in the 1968 General Election. He also said “I find a growing feeling among Republicans that it would be nice to have both George Romney and Jacob Javits, together in the future.”… Page 1: “Rusk Is Hopeful On A Settlement In Saigon Crisis”… In a briefing for congressional leaders the Secretary of State said he was “guardedly optimistic” that the meetings between Ky and the Buddhist dissidents would result in a satisfactory compromise. U.S Aides have reported good discussions that indicate a meeting may be initiated without further fighting… Page 2: “Ky Holds Danang As Rebels Yield”… but all the senior Buddhist leaders escape capture… To the north of Saigonthe American Ist Cavary wrapped up a seven day fight with Vietcong guerrillas and reported 207 enemy KIA whild suffering light losses… Page 6: President Johnson back in Washington after a long weekend at Camp David… National Debt at $332Billion, up from $3228 as cost of Vietnam War expenses increase with size of forces employed…

Page 7: “Call By Ships Of The Sixth Fleet Barred By UAR”… “Reliable sources reported today that the United Arab Republic had refused to permit the United States Sixth Fleet into the Port of Alexandria.” The action came about three weeks ago, not long after five Soviet naval vessels made a well publicized visit that included both Soviet Fleet Commander Sergei G. Gorshkov and Premier Alexsei Kosygin. They were hosted by President Gamal Abdel Nasser… Page 25: “Rights Unit Quits Parley In Capital”… The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee announced that they have withdrawn from the Jun 1-2 “Conference on Civil Rights” meeting at the White House. Their spokesperson said that “the President is not serious about guaranteeing the  constitutional rights of Negroes. We can’t in good conscience meet with the chief policymaker of the Vietnam War to discuss human rights in this country when he flagrantly violates the human rights of colored people in Vietnam.”

“U Thant Asks For Talks By All Concerned In Vietnam War”… The Secretary General of the United Nations urged direct negotiations that would include the Soviet Union, China and the National Liberation Front, and, of course, the actual combatants in the war. His speech in part…

“The world has been watching the inexorable escalation of the war in Vietnam with increasing anxiety. Little by little larger forces and more powerful armaments have been introduced, until an anguished and perplexed world has suddenly found that a limited and local conflict is threatening to turn into a major conflict. And through the fear of a much larger conflict may still have a restraining influence upon the demands of a military strategy, the temptation to win a military success may still prove stronger than the more prudent call to reason. As the war worsens, its justification in terms of a confrontation of ideologies is becoming misleading. For democratic principles, which both sides consider to be at stake in Vietnam, are already falling a victim to the war itself.

“In deed, recent events have shown that a passion for national identity, perhaps one should say for national survival, is the only ideology that may be left to a growing number of Vietnamese. What really is at stake, unless an early end to the hostilities is brought about, is the independence, the identity, and the survival of the country itself.”

24 MAY 1966 ROLLING THUNDER OPERATIONS… (NYT 25 May reporting ops for 24 May)…Monsoon storms held down American air attacks on North Vietnam to 33 missions in the 24-hour period ending at dawn (15th). Operations in the South included 489 sorties in support of ground forces and in the Ho Chi Minh Trail interdiction campaign. B-52s “blasted” a guerrilla area 35 miles west of Quangngai. One aircraft lost in combat in Southeast Asia on the day…

(!) CAPTAIN JOSEPH ANTHONY MACHOWSKI piloting an O-1F Bird Dog of the 21st TASS and 505 TACG out of Pleiku was downed by enemy ground fire and Killed In Action twenty miles west of Pleiku and 10 miles from the Cambodia border. CAPTAIN MACHOWSKI died in the cockpit of his aircraft and alone at the site of the aircraft crash in a South Vietnamese jungle 50 years ago today. No further information on the recovery of his remains.

RIPPLE SALVO… #86… Defense Department Report Card for Robert S. McNamara…  The Historical Office of the Office of the Secretary of Defense compiles and publishes a “Historical Series” that covers in detail the events and actions occurring during the tenure of every Secretary of Defense. Volume VI of the series covers the last four years of the Lyndon Johnson administration–March of 1965 through January 1969, a period dominated by the Vietnam War. Secretary McNamara served as SecDef from 21 January 1961 to 29 February 1968. Clark Clifford followed McNamara. This “report card” for the Secretary is composed of words written by the author of Volume VI, Edward J. Drea…

From the Preface… “Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan, so runs a popular aphorism, but due to tumultuous mid-1960s passage of the United States turned the saying on its head. Accounts of the period indict a wide variety of culprits–politicians, generals, reporters, demonstrators–for the disaster in Vietnam and its associated repercussions in the economic, social, political, and military spheres of American life. Yet perhaps more than anyone else, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara is regularly singled out as a cause and symbol of a lost war and all its dire consequences. Vietnam remains “McNamara’s War,” although it began long before his appointment as secretary of defense and continued long after he left office.

“Beyond Vietnam, McNamara’s legacy is almost as bitter and the charges as varied. He mismanaged the military services, leaving them under-funded, under-strength, and discredited in the eyes of the nation. He routinely disregarded military advice, particularly on strategic matters, leaving the United States weaker before the Soviet Union. He unilaterally implemented programs and disregarded their consequences, leaving the larger society poorer for it. Even more, McNamara remains a vilified man, and attempts to rehabilitate his reputation during the 1990s only served to reopen the raw emotions of the contentious Vietnam era. Such accusations cannot be easily dismissed and many are accurate or nearly so. Still, Robert McNamara and the Office of the Secretary of defense (OSD) operated in a broader context and by describing that setting one may derive a more balance view of McNamara’s and by extension OSDs successes and failures. That is my purpose in this book.”

Ripple Salvo’s Report Card on the Secretary will score only the Vietnam War aspects rather than the “broader context” of his responsibilities…

THEORIES OF LIMITED WAR AND ESCALATION… “After recognizing the futility of the war, he publicly continued to support administration policy, some would insist too enthusiastically, while privately he tr4ied to end or at least cap the violence. To his credit, he realized this by early 1966 and unsuccessfully sought ways to end the fighting or to reduce Westmoreland’s, Sharp’s, and the JCS’ incessant requests for more troops and planes and a wider war. to his discredit, he officially went along with the administration’s expansion of the conflict, providing a constant stream of reinforcements for the ground war in the South and adapting the air war against the North to conform to Johnson’s political requirements.”…. His theories failed…Grade of F.

BOMBING POLICY…”alienated the Joint Chiefs, military commanders and congressional hawks without accruing any benefits fro the administration. His controversial strategy originally hinged on fashionable escalation theory to intimidate the enemy. Like everyone else, he underestimated the North Vietnamese resilience and tenacity–the on-again, off-again bombing campaign never accomplished its goals. McNamara later insisted that it never was given a chance. North Vietnamese accounts have revealed occasions of near helplessness during the heightened bombing campaign; unaware of their duress McNamara supported bombing halts at critical junctures in hope of opening the way to negotiations… His bombing policies failed…Grade of F.

MANAGEMENT OF THE AIR WAR…”relied on secrecy, wishful thinking, and the exclusion of contradictory evidence. He went from one extreme to another–initially a hawk in early 1965, who advocated massive air strikes–by 1967 he had become a dove who proposed first to restrict the bombing to southern North Vietnam and then to stop it entirely. In between he imposed restrictions on the bombing campaign to limit expanding the war and supported gradualism policy of bombing pauses invariably followed by heavier bombing and renewed pauses. The POL attacks in mid-1966 and the strikes against Hanoi and Haiphong in late 1966 come to mind. Despite his growing doubts he generally supported these shifting strategies with his usual certainty and enthusiasm.”… His management of Rolling Thunder… Grade of F.

HEADWORK… “He never accepted that his single-minded determination to manipulate Rolling Thunder operations contributed to the dysfunctional air campaign. As he saw it, every JCS war-winning scheme advanced during 1965 and 1966 came to naught–the initial Rolling Thunder operations, the interdiction campaign, and most of the POL attacks–and left the secretary and his coterie more convinced than ever that Rolling Thunder had outlived its usefulness. Conversely, McNamara and McNaughton prided themselves on their sophisticated ability to transmit and receive nuanced signals from adversaries and manage conflict, but they displayed repeated ineptitude, failing to coordinate overtures for negotiations with stepped -up bombing operations, not keeping military commanders in formed, and agonizing over what Hanoi’s statements really meant.”…. Headwork…  Grade…F.

Words of this evaluation drawn from pages 534 and 535 of  Volume VI, a masterpiece by Edward Drea …. Grades by Humble Host…

Lest we forget…….          Bear                              ……….  –30–  ……….